No. She wouldn’t. Could she assume that Azoria understood what she had found? Yes. Better than Kaylin herself had. Azoria’s life was not a Hawk’s life. It wasn’t the life of a child who had been born fief-side, where law was whim and subject to change without notice.

Kaylin couldn’t have devoted the entirety of her life to study, to research, to ancient books and dead languages. She cared about living languages because they belonged to living people. The joy study gave Serralyn wasn’t in Kaylin. Never would be. She had studied, with intense focus, the things that she was certain she could use.

If Azoria intended to somehow anchor her life in a god, she wouldn’t randomly embed it. It wouldn’t be enough to be one of so many, many words. It wouldn’t give her control. It wouldn’t be her power. No.

She had watched Red work in his morgue; she had seen injuries that were fatal. She considered where she herself might have lodged her True Name in such circumstances: the heart.

But she wasn’t Azoria. That symbolism wouldn’t be Azoria’s. But the head, the mind: those were the things she prized, the things that she believed would yield power. The Ancient had been missing limbs, missing tongue. Flesh had been scraped and scarred so badly the scabs that had formed had become a prison.

And she remembered, then, the look of the gigantic word that they had approached in the distance. Not a True Word. Not a word that could ever return to the Lake. But it had been shaped as it had for a reason.

Entwining her fingers around fingers far larger than hers, she felt like a small child, but she took a figurative step back. Her sense of the giant, her sense of what he contained, she removed, layer by layer, until she was standing, in her mind’s eye, at the edge of the Lake of Life writ large. The waters were clear—clear and golden; they promised peace, offered both hope and despair, joy and sorrow, purpose and oblivion. They promised life.

There was never total freedom in life. Kaylin knew that better than Azoria had. But she’d found joy and a kind of freedom in becoming herself. In allowing hope, not fear, to guide her path forward. No path was smooth. No path was perfect. She stumbled. She tripped. She made different choices as she got back on her feet and dusted herself off. But she’d come to understand Corporal Kaylin Neya; she almost liked what she was now.

Azoria had made a different choice. She wanted to become something greater than she was.